SAP and Google Cloud Expand Partnership in Open Data Push
- By Paul Mah
- May 23, 2023
SAP and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership to give enterprises seamless access to their business data.
In an announcement made earlier this month, the two tech giants unveiled a jointly created open data offering to bring data from across the enterprise landscape using SAP Datasphere together with Google’s data cloud.
Customers can hence simplify data landscapes and view their entire data estates in real-time, and build an end-to-end data cloud to maximize the value of their Google Cloud and SAP software investments.
And by leveraging Google Cloud’s machine learning tools, enterprises will also be able to train AI models on data from both SAP and non-SAP systems.
SAP Datasphere is an evolution of the SAP Data Warehouse cloud. The managed cloud-based data service was first launched in March 2023 to deliver seamless and scalable access to business data.
“Bringing together SAP systems and data with Google’s data cloud introduces entirely new opportunities for enterprises to derive more value from their full data footprints,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE.
“SAP and Google Cloud share a commitment to open data and our extended partnership will help break down barriers between data stored in disparate systems, databases and environments. Our customers not only benefit from the business AI already built into our systems, but also from a unified data foundation.”
A unified view of data
At the SAP Sapphire conference held in Orlando last week, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted that a unified view of data of internal and external is a crucial part of business transformation.
He then revealed that the service already has over 300 customers, and is used by Google for “all” of its ERP analyses.
“What we've done with SAP is to make it trivial to migrate data from SAP Datasphere, into Google's BigQuery system, where you can integrate from external sources and run analytics that can be surfaced back to SAP,” he explained.
“It makes it better because you get not just your information but enriched information faster… and simpler because you can see it both in the analytical system and within SAP applications. We put a lot of security controls around it to protect and keep this data secure.”
Speaking to CDOTrends, Irfan Khan, chief product officer and president of SAP HANA Database & Analytics noted that the Google Cloud announcement is part of an ongoing effort by SAP to address that challenge that enterprises face with disparate databases and data repositories.
“No one vendor will own the entire data stack. We have to be able to interoperate with various vendors that are there. If we don't, then we put the emphasis and the burden on the customer to somehow have to integrate all these pieces together,” he said.
Finally, SAP and Google Cloud say they plan to partner on joint go-to-market initiatives for enterprises’ largest data projects, enabling customers to adopt data products from both SAP and Google Cloud.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Melpomenem
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.